iPads and iPhones are designed with the mentality of "just enough power" to do what is asked of the device. In other words, their CPU power is perfect for what they do, but the crunching power would not be so great.

SETI@Home uses intense floating point operations, something many handheld devices are not so great at. I would estimate that they would be no more powerful than a Pentium II CPU.

Beyond the CPU power angle, there is also the excess heat generation that would become an issue. Most devices already heat up after long periods of normal use. Crunching, even while charged, would generate a large amount of heat that the device wasn't designed to dissipate, and would likely shorten its lifespan considerably.

Personally, I don't think its a very good idea. I can only see a future where people try to launch lawsuits against Berkeley for destroying their devices due to the excess heat.

Another thing, BOINC is open source software, so no one should be able to ask money for it. It's very doubtful even that Apple allows a port of BOINC onto their proprietary software. So unless you want to go against your warranty and put another (Linux based) light OS on the iPad or iPhone, I don't think you'll see a BOINC port + Seti port any time soon. Jord

Ancient Astronaut Theorists can tell you that I do not help with tech questions via private message. Please use the forums for that.